She has a way of walking when she’s on the phone that she does not do at any other time, and today it went on long enough that I had the leisure to study it properly. It isn’t walking to get somewhere. There’s no destination in it. She starts in the kitchen, crosses to the hallway, turns at the little table by the front door, comes back through the living room, and does it again. Over and over. The phone isn’t even up near her face the whole time — half of it she holds down at her side, and her voice just carries, because apparently that’s allowed.
I noticed because the loop kept passing directly over the warm part of the hallway floor, which I had claimed earlier and had no intention of abandoning for her convenience.
The first few passes I let go. She stepped around me without looking, the way she does, like her feet have their own private arrangement with where I am at all times. But then the call changed — her voice got that clipped, faster quality it gets, and she started walking faster to match it, and that’s when I decided this had stopped being a harmless habit and become a Walking Problem requiring oversight.
Someone pacing that fast, not looking down, holding a flat rectangle against the side of her head while arguing with it, is a person in genuine danger of tripping over something, and the obvious something in this house is me. I did not see this as a conflict of interest. I saw it as exactly the kind of job only I was positioned to do.
So I started walking with her.
Not ahead of her — I tried that once and she nearly went straight into me at the turn by the front door, which only proved my theory and did nothing to earn me any credit for it. I adjusted to walking alongside, slightly behind, the way you’d want someone minding your flank. Kitchen, hallway, turn, living room, back. I kept pace. It is not easy to keep pace with a person who doesn’t know she’s being escorted and changes her stride without warning depending on what the phone is saying to her, but I managed it for three full loops, which I consider a serious athletic accomplishment that nobody present was in a position to appreciate.
On the fourth loop she stopped short at the hallway table to say something very firmly into the phone, one hand flat on the wall like she was bracing against it, and I did not stop short with her. I had committed to the pace of the loop and the pace of the loop did not include stopping, so I went straight into the side of her ankle at a speed that surprised both of us.
She made a sound that wasn’t quite a word and hopped sideways, caught the table with her hip instead of the wall, and the little dish she keeps her keys in slid half off the edge and had to be rescued by her free hand while the other hand kept the phone clamped to her ear the entire time, not missing a beat of whatever she was saying. I want it on record that the dish did not fall. I also want it on record that this was due entirely to her reflexes and not mine, because I had already retreated two full steps and was sitting with the specific stillness of someone who has never touched anyone’s ankle in his life.
She looked down at me mid-sentence, phone still going, and gave me a look that managed to be furious and fond at exactly the same time, which is a look only she has ever given me and which I have never fully worked out how to respond to. I held still. She went back to walking.
I did not resume the escort. I want to be honest about that. After the ankle incident I repositioned myself at the mouth of the hallway, at a safe remove from the loop itself, where I could observe the whole route without being part of it — kitchen, turn, living room, back — and I told myself this was actually the superior arrangement, a command position rather than a front-line one, and that any competent guard reassesses his method after an incident instead of stubbornly repeating it. This is true. It is also true that I did not want to get walked into again.
From the hallway I watched four more loops. Her voice kept doing the thing where it went up at the end like she was asking a question she already knew the answer to and didn’t like it. At one point she laughed, short and not entirely happy, the kind of laugh that’s really just air let out through the nose. At another point she stopped walking altogether and just stood in the middle of the living room rug with her free hand pressed flat against her forehead, phone still up, not moving for almost a full loop’s worth of time, and that stillness worried me more than any of the walking had. I came as far as the edge of the rug and sat there in clear view so she’d know, if she looked down, that someone had noticed.
She didn’t look down that time. The call went on a while longer, her voice dropping to something quieter and more careful, and then it ended the way these things end, with her saying a single flat word and lowering the phone and standing there a second with her arms loose at her sides like she’d forgotten what they were for.
I abandoned the command position and went straight to her shins this time, deliberately, at a pace she could see coming, and pressed the whole weight of my side against her the way I do when I mean it. She crouched down without saying anything and put both hands into my fur, one on each side, and stayed there long enough that my hallway spot would have gone fully cold by the time I got back to it, which I decided, for once, was an acceptable trade.
She stood up eventually, set the phone face-down on the counter like she didn’t want to look at it anymore, and went to put the kettle on. I followed her into the kitchen and sat exactly where her feet would need to go if she turned around too fast, which under the circumstances I felt was the least I could do.